As far as I’m concerned, I will do everything I can to maintain my initial role as designer and front end developer along side my new responsibilities rather than bringing on a new designer. Besides the fact that I believe that only I can carry out my vision better than anyone, I also love designing and every aspect of what it means to me too much. No doubt there will be times when I wonder if I’m trying too much, but I can honestly say that I’ll do everything I can do delegate my tasks so that I can focus on what I love and what I do best; creating beautiful graphics and websites in HTML and CSS.

For now though, I will be taking a break and taking a nice long week away in Hungary with my girlfriend. ROADTRIP! I haven’t been on vacation in years, and now, of all times, I think I deserve it more than any other time.

Holland’s first game kicks off in 10 mins! Dropping everything to go watch it!

EDIT: 0-0 half time… wtf?

EDIT 2: 2-0!!

The story of clients of yore, told oh so well by The Oatmeal, now hangs proudly in my office as a daily reminder that I’m probably on the wrong career path.

The fix simply involves placing a * before declaring the attribute which all proper browsers will ignore except for the oh so wonderful IE7 and then displaying the div inline

*display:inline;

and voila, it works in IE7. IE8 thankfully doesn’t need the fix and seems to work just fine with inline blocks… so far.

The blog even describes how to fix the issue for IE6, but to be honest, I didn’t bother with that as I gave up on IE6 a looong time ago.

This has got to be the most colorful brand and design I’ve ever created! But I like it and I’m happy how it finally turned out! Looking to launch within a month. Will post details about this project as they develop further.

One of my many functions here at Bonobos includes designing ads that find their way into the phone books. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t looked in a phone book, in like, ever! At least not till I started here. In any case, if you’ve ever seen the ads that are in there, they’re really, I mean, REALLY crap. It’s almost like the plumbers and electricians designed their own ads in MS Word. But then again, like many others out there, I believe that placing ads in the phone book is a dying business, what with the Internet and Google and what not. But apparently there’s still enough business being generated from this medium. So I’ve been attempting to take these ad designs to another level.

One thing I’ve noticed about most of the ad designs in the phone book is that they’re designed as if the reader (if you can call a person who’s looking through the phone book that) knows who they are, when question really is what they’re looking for. Which means that the company logo taking center stage isn’t the right way to go.

First of all, if the person knew who you were, they wouldn’t be looking through the phone book in the first place. Secondly, none of them stand out. They’re all the same, none of them shout anything out or entice me to call them for what it is I’m looking for. Full page ads have way too many bullet points with too much text talking about things I don’t know about or care about either.

In any case, I’ve been experimenting with various methods of print designs concerning ads aimed at the phone book. These are mostly full page ads so that does open up a lot of possibilities in terms of space. These ads are also placed towards the front of the category, so they’re more likely to get noticed. But on top of that, I’ve aimed my designs at grabbing the most attention, while retaining self respect and avoiding cheesiness and above all, they need to remain memorable in the few seconds that a “reader” browses the other pages. Kinda like web design, only static.

Advocaten & Juristen Nederland (Lawyers & Lawyers Netherlands) will be going live in the coming month now that the design has finally been converted into, what I consider, beautiful CSS and HTML code. It will be heading towards the developers in the morning.

In the mean time, I thought I would post the new brand which will be representing the series of sites which will fall under AJN. The main umbrella site will represent general law and legal topics and offices all over the country, while the series of website which fall under the umbrella will be representing more specific areas of law. I’m looking forward to the launch as I’ve seen other sites with similar intentions and functionality, but I find it difficult to grasp that those sites do anything but a good job at what they’re supposed to do. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Bonobos B.V. has been selected as Bedrijf van de donderdag (Company of the day for this Thursday) by Radio 3FM Serious Radio on the Arbeidsvitaminen (literally translated; Labor Vitamin) show, and Patrick Noordhoff, our Creative Director, has also been voted boss of the day! He’s being described as someone who’s crap at math because he thinks that if his opinion is different from that of 4 others, that it’s still a 50/50 vote. Obviously the exposure from all this is nice an’ all, but that our company’s top 10 gets played is the real plus point here! My vote for John Mayer’s “Waiting on the world to change” will get played too, very cool.

To start off with, I’ve lately inherited the responsibilities for everything to do with phonebook ads. Everything from their design to their final distribution and communication with the sales department. Besides creating SEO strong and beautiful websites, Bonobos also creates phonebook ads for its clients. Don’t laugh too hard, I chuckled a little too when I thought that there were still people out there who even own a phonebook. But despite the fact that it Is a diminishing market, it remains profitable to be a part of. Despite this, you wouldn’t believe how many badly designed phonebook ads are out there! I think it has a lot to do with companies designing their own ads in MS Paint rather than hiring on a professional design firm to get the most attention necessary out of an ad. Many of the ads cram too much uninteresting information into them and don’t get a clear message across, next to the fact that they’re just really ugly! Not that I care what other companies decide to do with their designs. It just makes my job that much easier, as long as the client doesn’t butt in too much.

Next to that, my quest to redesign a Google continued up until last week when a design which I had worked on for nearly 3 weeks was finally approved and green lighted for production! I think once it gets launched and I have the ability to show off screen shots, that many might scratch their heads and wonder what on earth we were thinking. But the shock and awe and recognition factor of the design will hit most visitors like a solid brick to the face! In a very unconventional and very un-Dutch way, I think we’ve managed to pull of something unique and exciting. I’m looking forward to its launch!

The other thing that has kept me from posting regularly was a project that involved designing a series of sites, about 11 of them, as part of a series of occupational based websites; meaning, a site designed specifically for electricians, specifically for plumbers, locksmiths, lawyers, roofers, glass handlers, etc, etc, etc. These sites had to interest visitors in need of such professionals to contact our trusted clients for that specific service. Now, I wouldn’t say that this was an easy project. Designing 11 sites which fit together as a series but are as different and unique as the next was challenging enough. But have you seen what’s out there? I’ve always felt that Dutch web design was always a bit on the boring side. Large multi national companies like the banks had websites that were too to the point and too clean. So once I had a look at a few of the smaller company websites out there… man, what a shock! I really think that this series of sites is going to make a huge difference, not just because of the effort and work we’ve put into them, but also because the competition out there, well, just doesn’t really feel like competition at the moment.

As my ex-colleague would always say “screenshots, or it didn’t happen”. I’ll get to them eventually and when the time is right, but for now, I’m going to take a long needed sleep after not having slept well for nearly 2 weeks.